What are swim lanes?
Visualization tool really.
See this writeup from Lucid Chart:
Hereās an implementation on the idea from Cellario:
edit: super tiny. Sorry 
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What is that a scheduler for ants?!
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Maybe something like that could be a starting point for your search.
Hi Everyone,
I recently started a company, Cheshire Labs, to create better lab automation software. Part of that mission is adopting an open core business model offering dual licenses. Iāve open sourced the core software for Orca scheduler under an AGPL license.
Orca works similarly to how cloud infrastructure is deployed. The developer creates a configuration file outlining labware, resources, methods, and workflows. Then deploys the lab automation workflow from that file.
The software is available on the ādevā branch, since itās an early beta. Review the README for information about how to use the software:
https://github.com/Cheshire-Labs/orca/tree/dev
A few benefits:
- Deployable environments for development, testing, and production
- Fits in your git repo and is diff friendly
- Modular design ā Workflows are built by combining methods
The software is an early beta and hasnāt been tested with live drivers yet. Use caution if you connect it up to a driver.
I look forward to hearing any feedback and if you know any labs interested in deploying this software, please reach out!
-Mike
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This is way cool, excited to check it out. Thanks for sharing!
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Thank you! Iām hoping to have it built out more soon to make it more user friendly and of course add some adapters for drivers.
Happy to answer any questions or discuss any feedback you might have after checking it out!
How do companies like Biosero (GBG), Hamilton(Venus), Bionex (VWorks) get around distributing 100+ device drivers to customers? Do you mean that as long as the source code for the drivers isnāt exposed it is okay to share the product? Or do they actually have licensing from every single company to use their drivers?
Vendors reach out to them or they reach out to vendors based on maximizing sales. Furthermore most hardware devices expose some hardware or software layers/interfaces for APIās.
Itās not true for all hardware but if you want big boys like Novo Nordisk or Amgen to buy your hardware, they will require you to have drivers in some form.
Hey Luis, good to see you around here. We met at the Hackaton earlier this year.
Makes sense, I donāt see an incentive for most hardware companies to not allow distribution of their software APIās. Weāve built an in house lab scheduler, from my experience, one of the nicest and easiest Iāve used. (Compared to GBG, VWorks, Overlord, Venus, etc). We have floated around the idea of distributing as an open source software some day. I havenāt seen anything open source that is actually practical and production readyā¦ yet 
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Hi folks, I came across this forum a few days ago, find it very interesting and just saw this thread. What do mean when you say āschedulerā? For some people a scheduler is just a tool to do make something happen at a certain point in the future (like an alarm clock). For others it is a GUI where you can drag and drop your tasks of a bigger workflow into some gantt chart into a suitable schedule. And for again others like me and apparently Huajiang, a scheduler is an algorithm that automatically computes timings (and sometimes device assginments) for task of a workflow according to a set of constraints and an objective. So basically turns this:
into this:
In the latter case we are developing an open source solution that is already running in multiple labs. The gitlab page is undergoing lots of construction and is not that pretty, yet. Just message me, if you are interested in more details.
ps: since it was asked in this thread: We work with SiLA2 for all devices.
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